Ginger, Ginger, Ginger! I Made Her Out of Clay!
This is a post originally from Ze Blog, posted on Valentine's Day, 2015.
It's Valentine's Day today (also YouTube's birthday), so I'm going to talk about Ginger Foutley from...you know where! I love this girl with passion, not only for her cuteness, but also for her sweet, well-developed character on the inside (though that doesn't mean she has the immunity to upset me in a few episodes, such as "TGIF" and "Mommie Nearest")! So with such love for her, combining with my love for making little creatures and characters out of modeling clay, out came this:
Last December, I got some brown clay and got to work practicing making Ginger's head out of clay.
I was specifically using this picture as a reference:
The Ginger head took about an hour for me to construct; afterwards, I stored the head in the freezer for a couple more hours. I felt proud of my first attempt at making Ginger out of clay, but I always knew it wouldn't be too easy (the hair, I tell ya)! Then, I challenged myself to sculpt a full-bodied figure of her, bake it, then paint it. The figure was of her reading the titular poem from the fantastic Emmy-nominated episode "Hello Stranger". I spent hours in my bedroom working hard on Ginger on Christmas Day. I thought she was looking great, but after I baked her...
Failure tastes like ginger! All that time and Craft Smart 1LB . Polymer Clay wasted! I was so very disappointed; I blame it on the weight of Ginger's cute but huge head (a character design trademark of sorts with Klasky Csupo's characters), why it broke off after the figure cooled off. Then, I tried adding a little more clay around the scrwany neck area, hoping that the head would stay on with extra support! But that didn't made things better either! And to add more wasabi to the sushi, the nicely-sculpted arms eventually broke off too, after the figure dropped to the carpet numerous times!
But...I'm not giving up! Once I buy more clays and paint, I'll try again at sculpting Ginger (as well as her friends Dodie and Macie, who I started to work on last Januray), only I'll be sure to make the necks thicker so I won't have this same problem. An ideal project I came up to craft is the three friends displayed together on a base as an incense holder.